Nakisa Hanelly, the leading organizational design and business transformation solution, enables companies to visualize their organization, engage their workforce, and track key HR data in real time.

Succession Planning Background

Historically, succession management has focused on finding the talent that best fits a role or position description. Human resources departments built complex competency frameworks, assessed job requirements, and aligned these with existing employee qualifications. The succession pipeline then emerged from the talent review and assessment process where employees’ performance, value, and potential were evaluated and calibrated. 

While this practice might have worked for regulated industries, like manufacturing, it introduced a lot of nuances and inefficiencies in a host of others. These competency frameworks lacked agility, required a lot of manual labor to maintain, and as a result were very quickly outdated.

For a large enterprise with thousands of positions, tracking core competencies for every role—even with job architecture inheritance concepts—requires a great deal of time and resources from HR. It can be a challenge for organizations to track and manage employee qualifications as well as align their evaluation frameworks uniformly to support profile matches between candidates’ qualifications and the competencies required for a given position.

Change Is the New Constant

In 2020, Gartner made projections of the strategic priorities and goals companies would focus on in the coming year. The top three CEO priorities they revealed were:

1. Grow the business
2. Improve operational excellence 
3. Execute business transformation

These C-level priorities have since shifted in response to the pandemic, and today executing business transformation is now the number one priority for CEOs. For HR leaders, this shift has translated to a heightened focus on organizational design and change management to support their CEOs’ evolving agendas. Adapting and changing is the name of the game.

Adapting and changing is the name of the game.

Due to the constant nature of change, succession planning has never been a straightforward process. Whether an organization takes a top-to-bottom approach by tracking key leadership positions or whether they start with the bottom line, roles are constantly evolving, and organizations need an agile approach with a diversified bench.

Recognizing, fostering, and developing employees based on their strengths has proven to be a much better approach than restricting them to merely focus on their job descriptions (unless you want an average-performing organization!). Multiple studies have shown, in fact, that true leadership means allowing employees the autonomy to go above and beyond their job description. This approach also significantly improves employee engagement, energy, and productivity, which, in turn, positively impact employee retention!

While in the past, succession planning may have been a relatively stable process, now more than ever, organizations require a more direct approach towards succession planning. To prioritize agility and business continuity, companies must be able to identify their talent pools quickly, easily, and efficiently.

Succession Planning with Nakisa Hanelly

Nakisa Hanelly is an organizational transformation solution, a platform that provides data-driven business values through:

1. Enterprise visualization
2. Agile organizational design
3. People Insights and experience powered by HR analytics
4. Data integration with HRMS

Our 2020 Fall Release expands on Nakisa Hanelly’s functionality by introducing a new, straightforward approach to succession planning.

Nakisa Hanelly’s latest product enhancements address key talent management processes and are product innovations that arose as a direct result of discussions with customers who identified a gap in the talent identification and succession planning solutions on the market. Based on customer feedback, many of the talent management solutions on the market were both conventional and convoluted and offered little focus on developing employees based on their strengths.

This is precisely why Nakisa Hanelly’s 2020 Fall Release introduces a straightforward, intuitive, yet sophisticated succession planning process that will be part of the overall Nakisa Hanelly platform. It addresses the needs of those organizations looking to simplify their processes without requiring the implementation of a full-blown talent management solution.

Previous Nakisa Hanelly releases have granted HR professionals the ability to visualize successors, either by using the succession-related Org Chart views or else via the Details panel. The solution has also allowed organizations to test succession modeling, that is, to transfer successors to the positions they had been nominated for when scenario-modeling.

Successor Visualization

Earlier versions of Nakisa Hanelly also allowed users access to Succession Management Dashboards to track key positions and bench strengths:
 

Succession Management Dashboards

With the Nakisa Hanelly 2020 Fall Release, users will be able to assign employees as successors to positions directly from the Org Chart!

Succession Management Org Chart

Users can also specify the readiness and ranking of their potential successor.

Successor Ranking

It’s now possible to edit and delete these assignments from the Details Panel directly:

Successor Assignment Editing

Nakisa Hanelly & the Future of Succession Planning

Our vision, as we move forward with our innovation, is to expand on this functionality in upcoming releases to cover a full process that starts from talent identification, assignment, and/or calibration. This process will support nominating employees based on their talent to different talent groups (for example, HIPO, Top Talent, etc.).

We’ll be introducing key position identification, the process of reviewing critical positions or assigning positions to different pools based on customer-specific classifications (such as profit and loss, high impact, critical, etc.). From there, talent management specialists or HRBPs can nominate candidates to succession pools or plans.

Successor Management Workflow

Learn more about how Nakisa Hanelly can support your business continuity plans here